A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

EARLY MORNING MUSINGS

In the past week or more, a number of you have posted
interesting and suggestive comments on this blog, to which I have not yet
responded.I hope to do so before I
leave for Paris on January 6th.This
morning during my walk [40 degrees -- quite comfortable], I turned over in my
mind what I might say.For some reason,
I found myself recalling what I had written in the first volume of my
Autobiography about my fruitful engagement with the Critique of Pure Reason.It
occurred to me that I had neglected to talk about one of the most important
motivating convictions of that effort, and though it is very far indeed from
any of your comments, I shall take a few moments to return to that pivotal
moment in my intellectual development and try to capture on paper my thoughts
from the late Fall months of 1959, when I was preparing the notes that served
first as the basis of my lectures in Philosophy 130 at Harvard and then as the
skeleton of my first book, Kant's Theory
of Mental Activity.

The philosophers among you [of whom, I believe, there are a
goodly number] will know that in the most important section of the Critique, the Transcendental Analytic, the pivotal notion is synthesis.It is a
priori synthesis, Kant claims, that explains both the unity of
consciousness and the objective validity of the laws of nature.Synthesis, Kant tells us, is an activity of
the mind.It is, in his words, a
"running through and holding together" of the elements of a manifold
of intuition, whether empirical or pure.[Wow!Just writing those words
takes me back.I hope they are not
utterly incomprehensible to my readers.]

All of the commentators before me simply took Kant's
characterization of synthesis at face value and then launched into elaborate
scholarly disquisitions on the distinction between pure and empirical synthesis
or the relation of schematized to unschematized categories [never mind.]But I was completely unsatisfied by their extremely
knowledgeable discussions, replete with citations of passages from Kant's many
other writings, published and unpublished, including even the Nachlass, the barrel of scraps of paper
left at his death.I did not want to
know every variant of Kant's use of the term "synthesis."I wanted to know what on earth the term
meant.Until I could explain that to
myself, the Critique would be a
complete mystery to me.

Now, "running through and holding together" is not
a description of a mental activity.It
is a metaphor [which, in my quirky mind, conjures up Tiny Tim singing
"Tiptoe Through The Tulips."]And I was unwilling to move forward a single step so long as this
central term was explained merely metaphorically.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important this
refusal was in my grappling with the Critique.It is, indeed, the key to every bit of
textual interpretation I have ever attempted, whether it be an interpretation
of the works of Kant, or those of Hume, of Marx, or indeed [to descend out of
the stratosphere] of Rawls.We are often
enraptured or mystified by the complexity of a philosopher's theoretical
elaborations, so much so that we spend our time unraveling that complexity, without
pausing long enough to make sure that we fully understand the central terms
that the philosopher deploys.A metaphor
is a promissory note, and unless we can cash it in for a plain, literal translation,
it is valueless.

So I went looking in the Critique
for some clue to the precise nature of this activity on which Kant grounded his
entire philosophical enterprise.I found
my answer, as the handful of you who have read my book will know, in a section of
the Critique usually referred to by
scholars as the "Subjective Deduction." This is a portion of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.Here at last I found a non-metaphorical
description of the mental activity of synthesis.[Indeed, in typical Immanuel Kant fashion,
one finds not one but three related
activities, to which he gives separate names -- "the synthesis of apprehension
in intuition," "the synthesis of reproduction in imagination,"
and "the synthesis of recognition in a concept."Never mind what all of this means.I just find it soothing to say these old words
to myself again, rather like a devout Catholic saying the Lord's Prayer or a little
child lying in bed at night saying to herself "Once upon a time ..."]

There was just one small problem with my discovery.When Kant came to issue a Second Edition of
the Critique in 1787, six years after
the publication of the First Edition, he revised or entirely rewrote certain
sections of the book, including the Deduction.And in
the Second Edition Deduction the Three-Fold Synthesis totally disappeared,
never to be seen again in any of Kant's subsequent writings!Well, that posed a bit of a problem, to put
mildly.If Kant deleted the so-called
Subjective Deduction from the Second [presumably authoritative] Edition, how on
earth can I possibly make an idea found only in that passage the key to my
entire interpretation of Kant's philosophy?

My answer is simple, and utterly unconventional. The importance of a great philosophical work,
I have always believed, lies not in its architectonic elaboration or the
fretwork of its superficial detail but in the power and depth of its central
insight.A truly valuable interpretation
will grasp that insight and struggle to make it perfectly clear and coherent, even if doing so requires ignoring or even
contradicting some of the statements that the philosopher makes about what he
or she is doing and what he or she believes is important in the work.Now, clearly it is a matter of philosophical
judgment what is and what is not the
central insight of a work.Hence, if I
may steal a turn of phrase from the French, all good textual interpretations
are guilty.

A powerful interpretation [what, in another context, Harold
Bloom might call a strong reading] of a text will present the reader with a
clear, non-metaphorical, simple, and -- dare I say it, beautiful -- reading of
that text that seizes what is centrally important in the text and ruthlessly
ignores everything else.Those of us who
undertake such interpretations make a gamble, when we begin, on a text, betting
our time and effort and commitment that the text, if wrestled with all night
like Jacob with the Angel, will yield up such a reading.

Well, that, more or less, is what I was thinking about this
morning during my walk.No herons, by
the way, nor deer.But as I approached
home, I did see a hawk in a tree.

4 comments:

You write "The importance of a great philosophical work, I have always believed, lies not in its architectonic elaboration or the fretwork of its superficial detail but in the power and depth of its central insight." And you comment that this is "unconventional". That is unconventional because with that step, despite your background and training, you stepped away from doing analytic philosophy, and joined traditional philosophy, which has also become known (bizarrely) in North American academic circles, as "continental philosophy".

Analytic philosophy insists that a philosopher's work is nothing other than the arguments presented. To claim that there might be a central insight, or philosophical position that is something other than the arguments themselves, and that the arguments and "architectonic elaborations" are expressions of the underlying insight or position is quite foreign to the analytic tradition.

This meta-philosophical aspect of analytic thought is of course a direct result of its approach to language, which generally rejects language as being "expressive" of something extra-linguistic.

I'm afraid that whatever analytic philosophy is, it isn't what you claim it is. Your last sentence ("This meta-philosophical aspect of analytic thought is of course a direct result of its approach to language, which generally rejects language as being "expressive" of something extra-linguistic.") is particularly odd, since it would be hard to find a so-called analytic philosopher who believes that. Of course, analytic philosophers' views on the relation of language to the world, of language to mind and indeed on all sorts of issues in philosophy are quite varied.

Aristotle distinguished between literal and metaphorical predication in terms of the respective bases. The later is based on similarity and the former is based on common properties. Now, the common property thing smacks of Platonism and no one, but no one is a Platonist. So, there is no predication based on the possession of common properties, that is, there is no literal predication. So, what is left? Metaphorical predication that is based on similarity. So, suppose that you're a good nominalist, and you see predication as always based on similarities. Then, also suppose that you now approach Kant's place in the history of philosophy. He appears great not because he cashed in a metaphor, but because he not only offered up a top notch metaphor such as synthesis and stuff like the emptyness and blindness of concepts and perceptions, but he offered these metaphors that look like they will take centuries to think through. I don't mean cash in, but think through in the way that we evaluate metaphors without exactly having some literal truth before us.

Page 101 of Kant's Theory of Mental Activity has been at the back of my mind for almost thirty years. Argggg!

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.